I don’t envy puzzle game developers. You must create puzzles that are impressive enough to be challenging and exciting, but not so much that the player feels more encumbered than empowered. The best run this line almost perfectly, and the Entropy Center is brimming with it. But The Entropy Center is more than its brain teasers, and it’s that “more” where the game hits its stumbling blocks. Still, its core design is unlike anything I’ve ever played, and genre enthusiasts will find that this game will bend their brains in new ways that are worth experiencing. I only wish the pace and glamor of the game could live up to the thrill that the 60+ puzzles gave me.
Since revealing The Entropy Center earlier this year, developer Stubby Games has been pretty clear on its inspirations. This sci-fi game takes place in an abandoned brutalist facility where you solve puzzles color-coded primarily orange and blue. Oh, and there’s an AI with a bubbly personality and a dry, dry sense of humor. Of course, I immediately compare it to Valve’s Portal series, and as far as gameplay goes, The Entropy Center succeeds.
Aria awakens in an abandoned lunar facility called The Entropy Center to find alone that Earth is about to witness a cataclysmic event. It happens and due to the destruction of Earth said space facility is now about to explode and Aria has to stop it. To do this, she must use her AI-powered weapon, Astra, to solve puzzles in order to charge the station with entropy so her time-reversal device can prevent Earth’s apocalyptic catastrophe. This premise immediately caught my attention, and I loved reading emails on the various computers at the center to learn about other apocalyptic events that entropy had prevented.
The story beautifully ties this premise, Aria and Astra’s place within it, and these in-world emails together, warning that without forward thinking, no outside force can help Earth survive; If we, humanity, don’t pull ourselves together, our world will die. I just wish the pacing of the game didn’t dampen a sense of climax that I might have felt otherwise. Several times I thought I’d hit the game’s big “a-ha” moment, only to find myself throwing myself through yet another gauntlet of challenges. And while I loved solving each puzzle individually, I didn’t like how often they felt like annoying roadblocks in the game’s third act. The entire experience feels bloated by this, and I felt drained more than anything as the credits rolled. Even so, that bloated third act is offset by a precedent two thirds that are intriguing and engaging in a way that the best games in the genre are.
The game’s dozens of puzzles all revolve around special dice. You place these cubes on pads to power elevators or open gates. Some cubes don’t do anything by themselves. Others act as stepping stones to help you reach high platforms or as bridges to help you cross gaps. The Entropy Center continues to hand out new types of cubes throughout the 15-hour experience, and I was excited to meet each one to see how they might rearrange my mind’s puzzle-solving toolbox. However, the dice alone do not reveal your solution – you need Astra. This weapon can turn back the time of a single object by 38.1 seconds, and this turns any obstacle into an obstacle that requires you to first imagine a sequence of events happening and then reverse it in your mind so that you can know exactly how you need to set it up. To put it simply, solving a puzzle in The Entropy Center requires you to determine where you need to end and work backwards to find the beginning.
I ended up solving puzzles with multiple cubes all doing different things, and felt like a genius watching various time-reversing paths place everything exactly where I needed it. It hurt my brain at first – a lot – but I quickly learned the rules by which The Entropy Center worked, and I was delighted to find an entirely new type of puzzle as a result.
Occasionally I would lose five minutes of progress because a cube would disappear into a wall, causing me to restart the entire sequence. Nothing was more frustrating than watching a cube slide into the wall before disappearing completely. The game also crashed completely for me a few times. Ultimately, however, the satisfaction I got from solving each puzzle outweighed the frustrations I experienced.
With The Entropy Center behind me, I’m fascinated by what Stubby Games has accomplished with its debut. It’s packed with excellent puzzles, but things around them, like bugs and narrative pacing, prevent the whole package from coming together in an equally impressive way. Despite the exhaustion I felt as the credits rolled, I’m thrilled that the Entropy Center exists. It brings something unique and new to the genre, and I hope Stubby Games continues that in a sequel, spin-off, or spiritual successor. It’s not every day that a game shows me something I’ve never seen before that nails it too, and what The Entropy Center does well is worth working through its lengthy narrative to make sure you do see every trick up your sleeve.
